'Kiss' in the Spotlight

It always good to 'find that you're in the rotogravure' (as Irving Berlin put it), even if Easter is still months away. A Kiss Before You Leave Me is the featured book today in The Indie Spotlight (a website to which you can link any day from my blog list in the column to the right). Greg Banks and Ed Patterson are the indie heroes behind the Spotlight--thanks, guys, for what is only one of your many acts of heroism.

In the brief interview with the Spotlight I give a few hints at the secrets behind Kiss. In fact, all that's missing from that page is a hot link or two, to Kindle, nook and iTunes listings for the book.

Short Pause for a Good Cause

Expect a hiatus for this blog, beginning soon and continuing through most of the month of November. There may be a quick post on the run now and then, and the blog list to the right should keep you current on day-to-day changes in the world of e-publishing and beyond. (And all the other links should continue to work about as well as they have in the past.) But I'll be back on a more regular schedule after Thanksgiving.

Autobiography of Mark Twain

Some of the readers' comments about the new edition (the first complete and unexpurgated edition) of Mark Twain's autobiography  are reminding me of one of the things I love most about Kindle: an easy-on-the-eyes Georgia (I believe) font that I can adjust to my liking. More than one reader has set out to read this first volume (743 pages; hardback list price $34.95, Amazon hardback price $18.87, Kindle price $9.99) in print form and been turned away by the minuscule typeface. (Check out the 'click to look inside' samples at the Amazon product page for the print edition; I'm impressed that anyone can read 743 pages of it.) It's nice to save close to half the price of the book (or more, depending on how you calculate), but it's even nicer to have the right typeface. More another day about this new edition of the autobiography, the first volume (of three) of which I've just downloaded. For now I'll just say that I'm impressed that the book is selling so well at Amazon, where it's #10 in sales rank as of this writing.

The Great Indie Book Contest

Win a free Kindle (complete with a $50.00 gift card) just by buying a book by an independent author (ahem, ahem) and forwarding the receipt in the month of November to Coelacanthpress@yahoo.com. Too good to be true? Check it out, get the official rules, enter and... win big!

Monetization, Schmonetization: From Jascha to Jascha

Most of the links on this page will bring me a small commission, and sometimes a royalty to boot, if you take them and end up making a purchase. The exception to the commission principle is any link to iTunes, including the iBookstore: those referrals are freebies, unless you end up buying A Kiss Before You Leave Me itself there. But, instead of sending you where you'd pay full price for my favorite set of recordings by my favorite performer, I'm recommending iTunes (where the price is so much better, at least until they come to their senses: US$9.99 for the equivalent of a 6-CD set) as a purveyor of the Icon collection of the best of Jascha Heifetz on EMI. Yes, it's all in mono, and yes, the average recording here is almost 75 years old. But, if you haven't sampled them, at least do that much. And this may help: a more readable list of the contents of the set, naming (composers') names and such.

[Added 11 August 2011: Full disclosure: I am now a member of the iTunes/iBooks/... affiliates program. New links to iTunes products will reflect this, and some older links will be updated. Otherwise, advertising policies remain unchanged. There are worse things than a little monetization.]